Five years after its first fine from Kansspelautoriteit, ONISAC is served a fresh course of good old regulatory wrath
The owner of Casino.com has once again fallen foul of the Netherlands Gambling Authority. Kansspelautoriteit said Tuesday that it has imposed a €450,000 fine on Gibraltar-based online gambling company ONISAC Limited for repeated violations of Dutch gambling regulations.
The recent financial penalty was the latest development in a years-long row between the Dutch gambling regulator and ONISAC and its sister company Mansion.
In a Tuesday statement, Kansspelautoriteit said that the hefty fine comprised several components. In the first place, ONISAC was slapped €200,000 for servicing Dutch gambling customers without the necessary authorization to do so. That initial fine was doubled to €400,000 for repeated violations of the gambling regulations of the Netherlands.
The remaining €50,000 of the overall fine was imposed because ONISAC charged Dutch players what Kansspelautoriteit labeled “unreasonable administration fee.” ONISAC’s Dutch gambling customers were charged a 5% levy each month if they were inactive for 180 days. The fee started from $15 and had a maximum threshold of $500.
The levy was charged until players had funds in their accounts. Kansspelautoriteit said in its statement that ONISAC’s online gambling operation has put customers at “an unreasonable disadvantage.”
Casino.com stopped accepting Dutch gambling customers in September 2018, and closed all Dutch accounts the following month.
Mansion/ONISAC’s Lengthy Row with Kansspelautoriteit
As mentioned earlier, this is not the first time ONISAC has received regulatory spanking for targeting Dutch players with its products. In 2014, the company and its sister operation Mansion were fined €150,000 for conducting business in the Netherlands.
The companies moved to contest the financial penalty in the Hague District Court. In a ruling issued in July 2017, the court sided with Kansspelautoriteit, stating that the regulator was right to punish the unauthorized provision of gambling services to Dutch customers.
Mansion and ONISAC appealed the ruling in the Council of State, but the latter supported Kansspelautoriteit’s cause of hunting down and penalizing erring operators.
As pointed out above, Casino.com bid farewell to the lucrative Dutch market in the fall of 2018. The operation’s owners have probably thought it would be the most reasonable move to exit the Netherlands for a while in anticipation for the passage of the Remote Gambling Bill. The piece of legislation had been stuck in the Dutch Parliament for the longest time before it was eventually approved in the Senate this past February.
The bill’s enforcement will pave the way for the liberalization of the Dutch gambling market and its opening to international operators. Interested companies will be able to obtain licenses issued by Kansspelautoriteit and conduct business in a regulated environment.
However, Dutch lawmakers agreed that gambling operators that have previously violated the local regulations will have to serve a two-year blackout period before being allowed to apply for a Dutch gambling license. With two fines on its record, ONISAC could potentially be among those operators that would be forced to serve the two years of punishment for previously servicing local customers.
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